Across many everyday contexts and technological devices, we encounter over and over again
a mechanical-translation act called scanning, performed by flatbed scanners, photocopiers,
barcode readers, televisions, x-ray airport security scanners, fax machines, retinal eye
scanning, MRI scanning, ultra-sonography, and earth-orbiting satellite imaging. What all of
these separate devices have in common is the same core technological mechanism and mode
of action—the mapping of differences along a surface to be known by a lensless apparatus
that detects via probe-signals. Despite being mobilized to very different uses and within a
large diversity of networks and media assemblages, scanners arise from a common
genealogical source—the conceptual union of photography to telegraphy. Scanners appear
everywhere in our modern infrastructure. It is impossible to avoid these devices, as they
mediate even the most basic transactions in everyday life, such as purchasing food at the
grocery store or checking out a book at a college library. Yet neither historians of technology
nor media scholars have addressed this quotidian device which enables so much of modern
bureaucracy in business, government and education to function. While the scanner’s absence
from the landscape of critical thought precisely marks the problem of the unremarkable in
viour scholarship, the metaphor of scanning remains present in both common and scholarly
discourse. Scanning may, at various times, stand in for a model of attention, a form of
reading, or serve as a simile for searching and/or diagnosing. The imagination of the scan
well precedes its appearance as a technology, which further indicates the necessity of
understanding this unexamined medium. This dissertation project investigates the object of
the scanner as a term for organizing the imagination and materialization of an entire suite of
technologies that we encounter daily. Conceived as a social history of technology married to
a film and media studies paradigm, this dissertation examines the scanner as a form of
machine-perception that, while it extends the dominant conception of the camera-prosthesis,
stands as its own unique model of perceptual mediation. The scanner remains unique in
media studies because so much of its identity depends upon the place it holds within the
historical conditions of the intermedial assemblage in which it has been mobilized. Through a
series of case studies in which I loosely divide scanning technologies into genres of
perceptual and epistemological function, I triangulate the epistemic role of the scanner in
each of its respective media networks.
